If Marx is indeed some sort of philosopher, he differs
from most such thinkers in regarding his reflections, however abstruse, as being
ultimately practical - as being at the service of actual political forces, and indeed as a
kind of political force themselves. This is the celebrated Marxist thesis of the unity of
theory and practice - though one might add that one aim of Marx's theory is to arrive at a
social condition in which thought would no longer need to be simply instrumental, geared
to some practical end, and could be enjoyed instead as a pleasure in itself.

Marx's political doctrine is a revolutionary one -
"revolution" for him being defined less by the speed, suddenness or violence of
a process of social change (though he does seem to consider that insurrectionary force
will be involved in constructing socialism), than by the fact that it involves the ousting
of one possessing class and its replacement by another. And this is a process which might
clearly take a good deal of time to accomplish. We can note here the peculiar feature of
socialism: that it involves the working class coming to power, but in doing so creating
the conditions in which all classes may be abolished. Once the means of production are
communally owned and controlled, classes themselves will finally disappear:

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify
their already acquired status by subjecting
society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become
masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode
of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have
nothing of their own to secure and fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

(Communist Manifesto)

Or as Marx puts it in the idiom of his earlier writings:

A class must be formed which has radical chains,
a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the
dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has universal character because its
sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the
wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.
There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a
human status ... This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

(Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

If the proletariat is the last historical class, it is
because its coming to power in what Marx calls the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" is the prelude to the building of a society in which all will stand in
the same relation to the means of production, as their collective owners.
"Worker" now no longer designates a particular class membership, but simply all
men and women who contribute to producing and sustaining social life. This first phase of
the anti-capitalist revolution is known to Marx as socialism, and it is not one which will
involve complete equality. Indeed, Marx sees the whole notion of "equal rights"
as itself inherited from the bourgeois epoch, as a kind of spiritual reflection of the
exchange of abstractly equal commodities. This is not to say that for him the concept
lacks value, but that it inevitably represses the particularity of men and women, their
uniquely different endowments. It thus acts among other things as a form of mystification,
concealing the true content of social inequalities behind a mere legal form. In the end,
Marx himself is concerned more with difference than with equality. Under socialism, it
remains the case that:

Socialism, then, is not about some dead-levelling of
individuals, but involves a respect for their specific differences, and allows those
differences for the first time to come into their own. It is in this way that Marx
resolves the paradox of the individual and the universal: for him, the latter term means
not some supra-individual state of being, but simply the imperative that everyone should
be in on the process of freely evolving their personal identities. But as long as men and
women still need to be rewarded according to their labour, inequalities will
inevitably persist.

The most developed stage of society, however, which Marx
dubs communism, will develop the productive forces to a point of such abundance that
neither equality nor inequality will be in question. Instead, men and women will simply
draw from the common fund of resources whatever meets their needs:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also
the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become
not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also
increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois
right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: "From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

(Ibid.)

In communist society we would be free of the importunity
of social class, and have the leisure and energy instead to cultivate our personalities in
whatever way we choose, provided this respected the injunction that everyone else should
be allowed to do so too. What distinguishes this political goal most sharply from
liberalism is the fact that, since for Marx an expression of our individual being is also
a realisation of our species-being, this process of exploring and evolving individual life
would be carried out reciprocally, through mutual bonds, rather than in splendid
isolation. The other is seen by Marx as the means to my own self-fulfilment, rather than
at best a mere co-entrepreneur in the project or at worst an active obstacle to my own
self-realisation. Communist society would also turn the productive forces bequeathed to it
by capitalism to the end, as far as possible, of abolishing all degrading labour, thus
releasing men and women from the tyranny of toil and enabling them to engage in the
democratic control of social life as "united individuals" newly in charge of
their own destinies. Under communism, men and women can recuperate their alienated powers
and recognise the world they create as their own, purged of its spurious immutability.

But socialist revolution requires an agent, and this
Marx discovers in the proletariat. Why the proletariat? Not because they are spiritually
superior to other classes, and not necessarily because they are the most downtrodden of
social groups. As far as that goes, vagrants, outcasts, the destitute - what Marx rather
witheringly calls the "lumpenproletariat" - would serve a good deal better. One
might claim that it is capitalism itself, not socialism, which "selects" the
working class as the agent of revolutionary change. It is the class which stands to gain
most by the abolition of capitalism, and which is sufficiently skilled, organised and
centrally located to carry out the task. But the task of the working class is to carry out
a specific revolution - that against capitalism; and it is thus in no sense necessarily in
competition with other radical groups - say, feminists or nationalists or ethnic activists
- who must carry through their own particular transformations, ideally in alliance with
those most exploited by capitalism.

What form would this society take? Certainly not that of
a state-run social order. The political state for Marx belongs to the regulatory
"superstructure" of society: it is itself a product of class struggle rather
than sublimely beyond that conflict, or some resolution of it. The state is ultimately an
instrument of the governing class, a way of securing its hegemony over other classes; and
the bourgeois state in particular grows out of an alienation between individual and
universal life:

...out of this very contradiction between the interest
of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State,
divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an
illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family
and tribal conglomeration - such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a
larger scale, and other interests - and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the
classes, already determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men
separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all
struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the
struggle for the franchise, etc. etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real
struggle of the different classes are fought out among one another.

(The German Ideology)

Marx did not always take such a briskly instrumentalist
view of the state in his detailed analyses of class conflicts; but he is convinced that
its truth, so to speak, lies outside itself, and sees it moreover as a form of alienation
all in itself. Each individual citizen has alienated to the state part of his or her
individual powers, which then assume a determining force over the everyday social and
economic existence which Marx calls "civil society". Genuine socialist
democracy, by contrast, would rejoin these general and individual parts of ourselves, by
allowing us to participate in general political processes as concretely particular
individuals - in the workplace or local community, for example, rather than as the purely
abstract citizens of liberal representative democracy. Marx's final vision would thus seem
somewhat anarchistic: that of a co-operative commonwealth made up of what he calls
"free associations" of workers, who would extend democracy to the economic
sphere while making a reality of it in the political one. It was to this end - not one,
after all, very sinister or alarming - that he dedicated not simply his writings, but much
of his active life.

Terry Eagleton is a writer and Professor of English at
Manchester University, England. The above is extracted from his essay on Marx in the
anthology The Great Philosophers (ed. Monk and Raphael), 2000.